GameOn, developer of Fairy Treasure, has been developing casual games since 1998, and we recently got in touch with them to find out how they got where they are today.

CR: Can you tell us a little bit about your background: Who are you, and why are you making casual games?

MM: My name is Mikael Mäkilä and I was born in a little Swedish town called Norrköping 29 years ago, where I still today happily live. Norrköping is a very beautiful town and it is the fifth biggest in Sweden, although it has only about 120 000 citizens. But I think it has just the right size, as it is not too small, you have access to all shops and entertainment you need, and it is not too big as you really can feel that you are at one with the town.

I have always liked to do things my own way and to be creative. For me, creating computer games is the ultimate way of art. It includes many of the classic art forms such as writing, painting, animation, music and sounds, which all is really great to work with and to express yourself and the ideas you have. Most important and rewarding in creating games is the interactive part that games introduce, which is something that is really amazing and exciting to discover! With all art forms, the artist wants to do what he/she likes to do and in the way she/he likes. This is why I choose to go indie and to make casual games, as it lets you do the games you want to do and to truly be creative. Also, it is a lot more rewarding to be able to create a game all the way from idea to finished game, instead of just sitting all day long in a huge game company and for instance working with game UI (even though the salary might be a lot higher).

CR: Fairy Treasure is now so well received, with reviewers all over gushing about how great the gameplay is. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience making it?

MM: Yes, we are really proud of Fairy Treasure and it has been a really huge hit, at least if you read all the awesome reviews it has got! But honestly we had even greater expectations on the sales performance, even though it has been on the top Ten list at RealArcade for five weeks (peaking at #3), four weeks at GameHouse (#3), Zylom (#1), Yahoo and many others. I think one mayor reason is that there are unfortunately only a few game genres that do really great. A few years back, it was the match-3 games that occupied all top ten lists, then the Puzzle Loop clones, and today the Tapper/BBB clones and ALL these hide and find games! In fact, I think it is a little sad in one way that it seems that the portals’ customers only like a few game genres. I actually think the main problem of all these clones is the huge demand for just a few game genres, which I think is due to the composition of the portals’ customer base rather than the lack of high quality games in different game genres or even game uniqueness.

Anyway, after 2-3 years of sporadically planning we decided to create a breakout type of game. We are big fans of these type of games, and we invested a lot of time (16 months) and resources in this game to get it as we think it should be, at least if you are going to market it in the casual market. We had a lot of fun creating it, even though we struggled a bit with a few errors that very seldom occurred. For example, the ball didn’t collide with the bricks sometimes when it was supposed to, and instead just went through the bricks without destroying them. Finally we discovered that there was a very small glitch in the collision algorithm, which let the ball go through a brick if it went exactly straight left or right. We are quite proud of the some of new game mechanisms that we added to the game genre. The river for instance, does not only look good when the small animated waves make the raft wobble, but it also makes the bonuses, magic bottles, coins etc. to slow down when they plumb in the river making the player get some extra time to catch the bonuses! If you collect 5 chain ball keys the player unleashes the magic chain ball, which is a very powerful boomerang like tool that the player can throw away several times smashing a lot of bricks. We thought these types of features could add greatly to the game play, especially when the player is just waiting for the ball to come down to the bat again when it is bouncing on the upper part of a level, so the player has some fun during the whole game!

We had a long list with a lot more great features that we had loved to include in the game, which we unfortunately couldn’t implement due to time and cost reasons. Depending on the final outcome of the game, we will hopefully be able to make a sequel to the game, where we would be able to make the game as it first was supposed to be.

CR: Tell us a little bit about your users. Who is playing your games, and why? How do you target your games to these users? How do you know when you have it right?

MM: Our own customer base that we have built up during our 10 years in the casual market, I think is mainly toward strategy and board games, due to the fact that all of our first games (Billionaire, Carl’s Classics and Billionaire 2) can be placed in these game genres. For about 10 years ago, when the games were distributed as Shareware games (which nowadays are known as Casual games or Downloadable games) the real distribution channels were download.com, zdnet.com and a few other download sites. Back then you could also get the game on many computer magazines cover disks/CDs, and get very decent sales. However, our latest games Hexalot and Fairy Treasure are more of usual casual games, and have been published by iWin and mainly distributed through the major game portals instead. When we distributed our first games by ourselves we had a much better control of what the players thought about our games, and we knew quite well based on the feedback if we had gotten it right or not. Nowadays when almost all the sales goes through the mayor portals, we get no feedback at all from the players, which is something we really miss a lot. I wish the portals were much better to forward both support issues and feedback from the players.

CR: Tell us a little bit about how you got into casual game development: What is your personal story about becoming a casual game developer?

MM: I have since my early years always played video and PC games. It all begin with the ABC 80 actually (a PC computer with Basic as both OS and programming language), and not with an Atari, Amiga or Commodore as many other lucky ones were privileged with. Especially, as the tape recorder was broken, I had to write down everything on paper just to write it in again to be able to continue the next time (if I couldn’t let the computer be turned on of course). I am really glad this is not the case any longer! However, quite soon I got my first PC, which was a decent computer but not the optimal computer back then though, and I started to make small programs and games just for fun. The very first big project was Miljardär, which was the Swedish predecessor of Billionaire. This business game was actually a usual board game from the beginning that my friends and I played a lot. I started to make a version in QBasic, but it never quite was completed, instead I moved on and completed it in VB. The game was completed in December 1996 and sent to some Swedish game computer magazines. I heard nothing back, but when I came home from the vacation in the summer 1997 the mailbox was chock-full of mail orders of the game!!! =) First I didn’t understand anything, but then after reading some of the positive comments and feedback written on the orders I understood that a Swedish magazine finally included a Shareware version of the game. I still can remember that glorious and happy day as it was yesterday. I was nothing less than overwhelmed by all the nice and positive feedback. There were many who said they played the game until late hours and simply couldn’t stop doing so! Ahhh…these were the days! =)

And from there, the rest is just history as you say, with a endless number of updated versions of Billionaire and then the sequel Billionaire 2, and our other 7 Swedish and English games.

CR: GameOn is based in Sweden. How is the casual game development industry there doing? What’s your take on it?

MM: As we started out by making games for the Swedish market, and continued doing so, we have a very good position in the casual market and a quite large customer base in Sweden. The casual market is not quite so big in Sweden yet, but I am absolutely sure it will grow very fast in the next few years though as a lot is happening in this area now. Also, the Swedish players seems to like games a lot more if they are localized to the Swedish language, so if you want to do good in Sweden you preferably should localize the game first I think.

CR: Looking at where you’ve come since your establishment in 1998, you’ve been so successful with games like the Billionaire series, Hexalot and Fairy Treasure, what have you learned about the casual market?

MM: As I have had the great opportunity to both form and follow the download/casual market since 1998 I have seen and learned quite a lot. One indeed major happening in the development of the download market was when a few companies in 2001-2002 saw the great opportunity and invested a lot in it. It was about at the same time the Shareware games market become “casual games” market and 60 minutes and the $19.95 price tag become standard, which was not always the case earlier. Today the casual market is heavily commercialized and more or less ruled by the top 10 gaming portals. If your game doesn’t make it to these portals, and if you haven’t already built up your own loyal customer base, you will most probably not survive as a game company (which you actually could before). So the portals entrance is not only positive I think, even though they of course have greatly increased the market and added many other positive things too of course. One really great thing is if you do get a hit game and get it on many portals, the potential is much bigger and much more gamers will be playing your game than if you have released it before the entrance of the portals. Further more, we have lately seen that several of the mayor retail game developers (EA, EIDOS etc.) and console makers (Microsoft, Nintendo etc.) are showing great interest in the casual market, which will even more commercialize the casual market.

CR: What are you changing about your games, and what do you think you still need to change?

MM: We always try to make as fun games as possible. That has been the main focus ever since we started the company. It is of most importance that you can easily understand how to play the game, which is nothing less than crucial. Lately we have increased the amount of positive feedback to the player, which can be done in many different ways including “eye candies,” trophies and encouraging words, which is very important too. Making the player aware of “where” in the game she/he is and how long the player has progressed on her journey is a good thing too. Social aspects, different online features etc. are just a few new features that we think are very interesting and we are looking closer to add in our upcoming games.

CR: What does GAMEON have coming up in the future? What’s your next hit going to be, and what should we know about it?

MM: We have just released a new game for the Swedish market (Kungliga Patienser ~ Solitaire Royale), which we probably will localize to the international market too in the near future. Besides that we are currently developing 2 more games. Unfortunately I can’t reveal too much, but one of the games is a puzzle game, which we have been working on for about 1.5 years now and we are indeed very excited about this game which have wonderful concept that we actually think the female players will love! The other game is a time management game, with many new fun game mechanisms, a very fun game play and a lot of humor!

CR: Is there anything else you’d like to tell our readers?

MM: I think actually that is about everything… Besides that I invite you all to our website www.gameonsoftware.com to read more about our games and hopefully you can’t resist the chance to download and play some of them! GAME ON! =)